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The search for habitable exoplanets and life beyond the Solar System is one of the most compelling scientific opportunities of our time. Nevertheless, the high cost of building facilities that can address this topic and the keen public…
Following the recommendations to NASA and ESA, the search for life on exoplanets will be a priority in the next decades. Two direct imaging space mission concepts are being developed: the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) and the Large…
The ultraviolet (UV) window has been largely unexplored through balloons for astronomy. We discuss here the development of a compact near-UV spectrograph with fiber optics input for balloon ights. It is a modified Czerny-Turner system built…
Hubble is still in prime observing condition for making transformative discoveries in UV astronomy. In this white paper we describe the science case for a deep (S/N>30) UV spectroscopic survey with HST/COS targeting approximately 20 QSOs at…
Building on the experience of the high-resolution community with the suite of VLT high-resolution spectrographs, which has been tremendously successful, we outline here the (science) case for a high-fidelity, high-resolution spectrograph…
Polarization provides additional diagnostic opportunities for probing the structured environments of massive stars as well as the illumination of those environments by stars that are not spherical. After a brief overview of polarization…
NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) concept and the 2020 Decadal Survey's recommendation to develop a large space telescope to "detect and characterize Earth-like extrasolar planets" requires new starlight suppression technologies to…
Magnetic fields play a crucial role in planetary evolution and habitability. While the intrinsic magnetic fields of solar system planets are relatively well understood, the magnetic properties of exoplanets remain largely unconstrained,…
Characterizing the surface and atmosphere of Earth-like planets in reflected light is a key goal for upcoming direct imaging surveys. NASA's next flagship-class astrophysics mission concept, the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), is a…
Executive Summary: The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is the first astrophysics flagship mission with a key cross-divisional astrobiology science goal of searching for signs of life on rocky planets beyond our solar system. The Living…
The Habitable Exoplanet Observatory, or HabEx, has been designed to be the Great Observatory of the 2030s. For the first time in human history, technologies have matured sufficiently to enable an affordable space-based telescope mission…
PolStar is an Explorer-class far ultraviolet (FUV) spectropolarimetry mission designed to target massive stars and their environments. PolStar will take advantage of resonance lines only available in the FUV to measure for the first time…
The atmospheres and surfaces of planets show tremendous amount of spatial variation, which has a direct effect on the spectrum of the object, even if this may not be spatially resolved. Here, we apply hyper realistic radiative simulations…
The Polstar small explorer concept is for an ultraviolet (UV) spectropolarimetry space telescope mission with a focus on massive star astrophysics. The instrument waveband will be from 115 nm - 286 nm for spectroscopy and 122 nm - 286 nm…
From life on other planets to virtual classrooms this thesis spans a wide array of research topics all based on how we see other worlds. Our understanding of everything from moon phases, the planets in our Solar System, and exoplanet…
Polarized scattering in planetary atmospheres is computed in the context of exoplanets. The problem of polarized radiative transfer is solved for a general case of absorption and scattering, while Rayleigh and Mie polarized scattering are…
In this work, we assess the potential detectability of solar panels made of silicon on an Earth-like exoplanet as a potential technosignature. Silicon-based photovoltaic cells have high reflectance in the UV-VIS and in the near-IR, within…
The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) aims to telescopically constrain the frequency and abundance of biospheres in the solar neighborhood. Origin-of-life theories vary in their predictions for the environmental requirements and the…
X-ray observatories contribute fundamental advances in Solar System studies by probing Sun-object interactions, developing planet and satellite surface composition maps, probing global magnetospheric dynamics, and tracking astrochemical…
Ultraviolet (UV) planetary astronomy is a unique tool to probe planetary environments of the solar system and beyond. But despite a rising interest for new generation giant UV telescopes regularly proposed to international agencies, none…